I am both flattered and apprehensive to be playing the role of one half of Andrew Sullivan for you this week. (The other half belongs to Will Wilkinson.) I’m going to be presumptuous and say I suspect I’m here to represent the left-hand portion of Andrew’s psyche. I started out, years ago, writing mostly for The Awl. More recently I’ve been writing for Gawker and The Guardian. Though I’ve had my fair share of mud thrown at me online, few have ever accused me of anything like libertarianism. Or even centrism. Blame it on my being born and raised in the heathen socialist wilds of Canada, if you like.
Introductions are awkward so let’s keep this short: I do a lot of culture writing, some of it criticism, some of it journalism. But given the choice, I’d write mostly about the dead. I like history. I also like books, though my preference skews to old, weird books. I know way too much about the history of American magazines. And I really like old headlines.
When forced to consider more contemporary matters, I usually natter on about feminism and women’s issues, about crime and criminal justice, and about the law more generally. In a previous life I was a lawyer of the worst kind, meaning a corporate lawyer at a white-shoe law firm. I’ve felt the need, since, to pay off some karmic debts.
At the moment I’m in the process of finishing a book about women critics and intellectuals from Dorothy Parker to Janet Malcolm. I call it Sharp: The Women Who Made An Art of Having an Opinion. It’ll be published sometime in 2016.
I also have what most of the internet seems to agree is a very attractive cat. I promise not to write about her too much this week.
Rape on college campuses is undoubtedly a real and serious problem, but as Michael Brendan Dougherty reminds us, it pales in comparison to rape in prisons, where victims get no publicity, no sympathy, and no justice. Hell, we even joke about it, even in children’s cartoons (as seen above):
In prison, men may become the victim of repeated gang rapes. Prisoners can be locked into cells with the men who prey on them. Some live under the constant threat of sexual assault for decades. Their efforts to report their rape are ignored or even punished, both by prison personnel and an inmate culture that destroys “snitches.” The threat of rape is so pervasive it causes some inmates to “consent” to sex with certain prisoners or officers as a way of avoiding rape by others.
Acceptance of prison rape is a stinking corruption. No conception of justice can include plunging criminals into an anarchic world of sexual terror. And obviously it thwarts any possibility of a rehabilitative justice that aims to restore criminals to lawful society. Inmates are not improved or better integrated into society through physical and psychological torture. Prison rape also vitiates any sense of retributive justice, since rape is not a proper punishment for a crime. Allowing prison rape is just a vindictive horror, and when accepted under the name of punishment makes criminals the victims of justice.
Sadly, some Senators are looking to defang the Prison Rape Elimination Act:
PREA required states to certify by May of 2014 that they were in compliance with the standards, or promise that they would eventually comply. States that refuse to do either can be penalized with a loss of five percent of their federal funding for prison-related purposes. But a proposal that originated in the Senate Judiciary Committee would almost completely eliminate financial penalties for states that defy the rape prevention law. The proposal, written by Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas — the most vocally defiant state — was agreed on by the committee in an after-midnight session in September and was attached to an unrelated bill.
The bill carrying the PREA amendment failed to pass, but members of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, a federal body that spent years developing the PREA standards, say efforts are already underway to reintroduce the amendment during the next legislative session.
A reader’s story of prison rape posted here. Update from another:
Thanks for posting that piece on prison rape. I thought you might be interested in the following scene from Rectify, a TV drama about a death row prisoner who is exonerated after nearly two decades in jail. It features the main character, Daniel, talking to his stepbrother, Ted, about his experience of being raped in prison. This scene conveys a sense of visceral agony that reports and columns cannot and it helped me realize the extent to which prison rape is a silent crisis:
For a riveting memoir on the subject, check out Fish by T.J. Parsell, who was gang-raped upon entering prison at the age of 17.
Congress’s spending bill interferes with the legalization of pot in DC. But Josh Voorhees focuses on another provision in the bill, which “stops the Justice Department from spending a dime to prosecute patients or medical marijuana dispensaries that are acting in accordance with state law but running afoul of federal ones”:
In shear terms of people impacted, the medical provision will dwarf that of the more publicized D.C. ban, even assuming the latter survives a potential legal challenge. The District is home to roughly 640,000 people; California, one of 23 states where medical pot is legal, is home to more than 38 million. Forcing the federal government to respect state medical marijuana laws has long been a goal of the legalization movement, but one that had previously proved unattainable.
He finds it telling that “a sweeping provision that could fundamentally reshape how the federal government treats medical marijuana slipped through with hardly a peep”:
That just goes to show how far the battle lines have shifted in the favor of the pro-pot crowd and suggests that, in spite of the potential setback in the District itself, the future for their side in Washington is a brighter one.
Having Congress not longer actively opposing medical marijuana is a big victory for the reform movement, but not a complete solution. The provision is only a short-term and incomplete fix. Medical marijuana is still technically illegal under federal law which will continue to causes issues with things like taxes for medical marijuana business. The provision also only applies to this one year funding bill.
What will this mean on the ground? It should mean that DEA and other branches of the Dept. of Justice can no longer threaten medical marijuana providers (or more theoretically, patients) with arrest or prosecution, and that landlords should no longer face the threat of asset forfeiture for property being rented to medical marijuana businesses. But the precise language, which focuses on states’ implementating medical marijuana systems, could be argued as applying more narrowly, giving reassurance to state officials about their participation but not going further. Another concern is that a prosecutor could argue, for example, that a given marijuana business is not operating in strict accordance with a state’s law. Our perspective in the movement is that that determination should be up to state authorities, not federal, but that’s not necessarily the perspective of federal law enforcement. Those are some reasons why it remains to be seen just how thoroughly and reliably the protections that the new law provides will turn out to be, and these questions are being debated right now.
Meanwhile, Walker urges Obama to intervene on DC’s behalf:
If the Obama administration uses their power to move marijuana to Schedule II or III, this legal impediment on D.C. taxing and regulating marijuana would theoretically be removed. Potentially, there might still be a legal fight over whether raw marijuana would count as a tetrahydrocannabinols derivative, but one can argue that legal term is meant to apply only to newly-discovered and potentially dangerous synthetic tetrahydrocannabinols derivatives, which are often being sold as “incense.” Once again, if both the D.C. Council and the Obama administration share support for this interruption of the law, any legal challenge is unlikely to succeed.]
And Dylan Matthews, who voted for legalization in DC, wants his vote counted:
It’s easy to dismiss the importance of ensuring marijuana legalization in DC. Pot policy tends to be treated as a laughing matter, and DC is admittedly the third smallest state/quasi-state by population. But it’s still, substantively, among the most important riders in the CRomnibus. DC had a higher marijuana possession arrest rate in 2010than any other state (perhaps understandably, as it’s the only city-state): 846 arrests per 100,000 residents, which works out to about 5,091 arrests total.
That’s over 5,000 people a year paying fines, doing community service, and going through probation; it’s over 5,000 people who’ll forever have to check the box on job applications asking if they’ve ever been arrested, among many other consequences for employment, government benefits, child custody, and more. DC also has the second biggest gap between black and white arrests of any state: 1,489 arrests per 100,000 black residents versus 174 per 100,000 white residents. Black Washingtonians are over eight times likelier to be arrested for the same crime, when there’s no evidence of any racial gaps in actual marijuana usage.
(Photo: A man purchases medical marijuana, the first legal sale, at Capital City Care in Washington, DC on July 29, 2013. By Linda Davidson / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
That’s what Abraham Riesman concludes in his post-mortem for the magazine:
In their defense, they had no idea they were doing it. But in recent years, the nature of cat adoration (and I must offer full disclosure here: I am the parent of two cats) has changed radically. Though Cat Fancy tried to adapt, it never totally broke free from its origins in a different era of cat enthusiasm. To understand the seismic shift in cat culture, you can start by picking apart Cat Fancy‘s name. It used to be much more than a whimsical reference to the enjoyment of felines. When the magazine launched in 1965, animal lovers were very familiar with something called “the cat fancy.” The term referred to a connoisseurlike approach to cats: following professional cat shows, maintaining directories of cat breeders, and recognizing the importance of purebred bloodlines. “Back then, the people who had all the knowledge tended to be the people who were showing cats, breeding cats, everything like that,” said Melissa Kauffman, senior editorial director for I-5. …
[R]eaders of Cat Fancy in its early decades would likely be aghast at the shape of today’s cat passions. Modern feline icons like Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub are mutts with genetic deformities. They wouldn’t have made it past the front door at a Golden Age cat show. And their many public appearances are filled with fans who would disdain anyone who gets a cat from a breeder rather than a shelter.
Here’s what Cat Fancy‘s replacement, Catster, looks like:
But beyond the covers, what will Catster the magazine be? Much of that won’t be clear until the first issue hits stands in February, but all evidence indicates that it will be extremely photo-oriented, very lighthearted, filled with lists and confessionals, and committed to treating cat ownership as a lifestyle rather than a hobby or a medical burden.
“Catster is for the cat-selfie generation,” Huey-Steiner said. “It’s for people who consider cats an integral part of their social lives. It’s about fun things and knowing that cats rule the roost.” That means lists like “19 Crazy Cat Superstitions” and “Litter-Box Accidents Waiting to Happen,” as well as pieces like “How to Cat-ify Your Cubicle.” There will still be some breed information and veterinary advice, but neither will be a major focus. And then there’s the celebrity aspect. “We want to capitalize on the role that cats play in the lives of celebrities, whether that’s somebody like a Taylor Swift and how she talks about her cats or someone else,” Huey-Steiner said. “You’d never see that in Cat Fancy.”
Alexander Stille describes Éric Zemmour’s book, Le Suicide Français, as “a wildly over-the-top broadside condemnation of everything that has happened in the past fifty years, such as birth control, abortion, student protests, sexual liberation, women’s rights, gay rights, immigration from Africa, American consumer capitalism, left-wing intellectualism, the European Union”:
In Zemmour’s view, both the traditional French left and right (really, everyone but the French far right) have, through a mixture of blindness and cowardice, allowed for the dismantling of a national edifice based on paternal authority. It is highly revealing that Zemmour uses the term “virilité,” or virility, some twenty-three times in his five-hundred page book, suggesting a certain fixation.
The popular success of “Le Suicide Français” is in keeping with a well-established tradition: it takes its place on a long shelf of books that have declared the decline or death of France.
As early as 1783, as Sean M. Quinlan notes, in “The Great Nation in Decline,” the French began to churn out tracts like one which laments that “a flagging, weak and less vivacious generation has replaced, without succeeding, that brilliant [Frankish] race, those men of combat and hunting, whose bodies were more robust, cleaner and of greater height than those of today’s civilized peoples.” The French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, in 1871, set off a spate of self-flagellation, with writers decrying a declining birth rate, an inferior education system, and moral bankruptcy. Although nostalgists like Zemmour consider the late nineteenth century a golden age, when France emerged as an imperial power and a center of cultural greatness, his counterparts in that period saw a cesspool of effeminacy and decline. One of the big books of 1892 was “Degeneration,” whose author, Max Nordau, was Hungarian but lived most of his life in Paris. He excoriates Émile Zola and writes that the Impressionists can only be understood in terms of “hysteria and degeneracy.”
Stille tries to put things in perspective:
France is no longer an empire, but it is a prosperous medium-sized country with an extremely high standard of living. It is no longer the world’s cultural center, but it has far more influence than most societies. France remains among the top twenty countries by virtually all measures of the World Bank’s Human Development Index. Life expectancy in France has increased from fifty to nearly eighty-two years in the past century, even as France’s global role has shrunk. Aging population, declining birth rates, slower growth, a more skeptical attitude toward authority, and greater gender equality—those are all typical of advanced, post-industrial societies, not unique to France.
I’ve been really heartened by many Christians’ responses to the Torture Report’s cataloguing of evil done in our name and behind our backs. The Catholic Bishops need to do much more, but this was a start:
The Catholic Church firmly believes that torture is an ‘intrinsic evil’ that cannot be justified under any circumstance. The acts of torture described in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report violated the God-given human dignity inherent in all people and were unequivocally wrong … We have placed ourselves through our history as a beacon of hope, a beacon of reason, of freedom: and so, this recent chapter in our history has tarnished that.” He went on to say, “It is not something that can be easily regained, but I think that the publishing of this report begins the cleaning up of that tarnishing of our reputation as a nation that is on sound moral footing.
From reading the report, it should now be crystal clear to anyone who has read the teachings of Jesus as found in scripture that one cannot swear their allegiance to America while simultaneously giving our allegiance to the alternate way of Jesus. Absolutely, positively, impossible. The contents of the report reveal what the US has done, and what has been done is anti-Christ – pure, absolute evil.
The crucifixion of those with already broken limbs should surely have a resonance, even among white evangelicals.
I also sense a slight opening for a way forward. There is no question in my mind that these grotesque human rights violations will require justice – if only compensation for torture victims. I agree with Harold Koh that not prosecuting open war crimes is equally intolerable in a democratic society – and sends a terrible message to all dictators and thugs across the planet that they can now torture at will. But there’s also an obvious next step: give Michael Hayden what he wants.
The Intelligence Committee should insist on interviewing all the torture suspects who are busy complaining they didn’t get to give their take (even though interviews with them from the CIA’s internal review is in the report, as are the CIA’s full, considered response). For good measure, the Obama administration should provide to the committee all the documents it has on the torture program. In other words: let’s update the report with as much data as we can possibly find. I sincerely doubt that it will turn up anything less incriminating than the CIA’s own records, but this is so grave and foundational a matter, we should make every effort to have the equivalent of a Truth Commission. The SSCI report is a great start.
21 more readers became subscribers this weekend. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here (you purchase one today and have it auto-delivered on Christmas Day). Dish t-shirts are for sale here and coffee mugs here. A final email for the week:
I want to thank you for the writing you’ve done about the way we treat animals in the factory farm system. Before reading your blog, I was vaguely aware that there was controversy, but I will admit that I was not as thoughtful about where my food came from as I ought to have been. It was your blog that introduced me to these horrifying maternity pens, which sent me looking for more information, and pretty soon after that I decided that I couldn’t be part of a system that included such cruelty. I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with raising animals for meat; I just think that before they are humanely slaughtered, there ought to be some recognition that these are living creatures who can feel pain, both physical and emotional.
Anyway, I stopped buying pork from the grocery store, found two local farms that raise and slaughter their animals in humane conditions, and then stopped buying meat from the grocery store all together (because what the farming system does to chickens and cows might not be as bad as what it does to those poor sows, but it’s not much better). It’s undeniably more expensive, so we eat quite a bit less meat, which in the long run is probably a big win for my family’s overall health and small win for the environment. So, even if there’s nothing you and your staff can do to convince Christie to buck political forces and do what’s right for these animals, you’ve inspired at least one of your readers to do what little she can by taking her dollars elsewhere. Thanks, and keep up the great work!
I’m taking next week off blogging to deal with other pressing Dish business. Michelle Dean and Will Wilkinson will be guest-blogging, alongside our regular Dish team. I may post on torture and a few other topics, so I won’t be off-grid. Just trying to keep the Dish alive and well.
The rest of us will see you in the morning.
(Photo: The shadow of a protester in a hoodie is seen in the glow of police lights on the wall of a church during a ‘Millions March’ demonstration protesting the killing of unarmed black men by police on December 13, 2014 in Oakland, California. The march was one of many held nationwide. By Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images.)
Perhaps the only saving grace of this sociopath formerly in high office is that he understands that his legacy could well be as a war criminal unlike any in American history before him. That’s my only explanation for why he has to be out there day after day, year after year, attacking his successor, lambasting America’s return to civilization, and insisting that hanging people from shackles, freezing them to near-death, near-drowning them so that their abdomens are distended with water, anally raping them, breaking their limbs, and keeping them awake so long they hallucinated … is not somehow torture. Ask yourself: have you ever met someone who believes that? Outside the professional criminal classes, that is.
And in his response today to the voluminous and undisputed evidence supplied by the CIA’s own internal documents, he has nothing specific or factual to say that can undermine any of it. He just insists, like a dad lost on a car trip, that he alone knows he’s not lost, whatever the map or GPS says. His best talking point is that those who authorized and committed the torture were not interviewed by the committee – implying this was because of bias. But this is transparently false. Six months into the investigation, the attorney general announced his own study into CIA torture techniques. Here is Senator Feinstein’s account of what happened next:
The committee’s Vice Chairman Kit Bond withdrew the minority’s participation in the study, citing the attorney general’s expanded investigation as the reason. The Department of Justice refused to coordinate its investigation with the Intelligence Committee’s review. As a result, possible interviewees could be subject to additional liability if they were interviewed. The CIA, citing the attorney general’s investigation, would not instruct its employees to participate in our interviews. (Source: classified CIA internal memo, February 26, 2010).
In any case, there were plenty of previous interviews with CIA torturers, including from the CIA’s own internal investigation, there was a formal CIA response to all the charges (highly unpersuasive because they have to argue against their own records), and, so far as I know, interviewing them all over again is still possible. Come to think of it, why doesn’t the committee take that up again under GOP leadership, if their perspective will allegedly alter the conclusions?
But in the Cheney interview, there is nothing faintly that rational. He is behaving like a cornered man. On what possible grounds does he dismiss 6.3 million pages of documentation from the CIA’s own records as “full of crap”? The CIA had a chance to rebut every one of the conclusions with other documents and failed to. This is preposterous as well as slanderous to the extraordinary work behind this remarkable report. But the most revealing parts of the interview were the following, it seems to me. Todd asked Cheney at one point what he believed the meaning of torture is, after citing the rectal hydration issue (which seems to have upset more people than any other technique). And this is what Cheney said:
I’ll tell you what my definition of torture is: what nineteen guys armed with airline tickets and boxcutters did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11.
Later, when confronted with an example of a human being suspended by his wrists from shackles so he could barely touch the floor for 22 hours a day for two weeks, Cheney refused to say that that wasn’t torture. Instead he repeated:
Torture is what the al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11
What I take from these statements is that the torture program was, for Cheney, partly an amateur thug’s idea of how you get intelligence, but partly also simply a means of revenge. Yes: revenge. This was a torture program set up in order to vent rage and inflict revenge. It was torture designed to be as brutal to terror suspects as 19 men on 9/11 were to Americans. Tit-for-tat. Our torture in return for their torture; their innocent victims in return for ours. It was a program that has no place in a civilized society.
He was then asked about the 26 people whom the CIA admits were tortured by mistake. One of them was even frozen to death. A sane and rational and decent human being, who presided over the program that did this, might say: “The decision to torture was an extremely agonizing one, but I still believe defensible. But of course the torture of innocent people is horrifying. I deeply regret the chaos and amateurism of the program in its early phases.”
So what did Cheney actually say? When confronted with the instance of Rahman Gul, the individual tortured to death, Todd asked what the US owed these torture victims. Cheney actually said this:
The problem I have is with all the folks we did release who ended up on the battlefield … I have no problem [with torturing innocent people] as long as we achieved our objective.
It doesn’t get any clearer than that. The man is a sociopath. He is a disgrace to his country. And he needs to be brought to justice.
Joseph Burgo shares his experiences using telemedicine in his therapy practice:
No doubt it would be better if my clients and I were able to meet in my office week after week, me inviting them in from my waiting room at the beginning of each session and ushering them out through the exit door at the end. But for people who live in remote locations where qualified professional help is scarce or entirely unavailable, connecting with a therapist by Skype is often the best option. Over the last few years, I’ve worked with an American expat living in Japan, a Ukrainian émigré in Israel, and the scion of a wealthy family in Egypt. I’ve held Skype sessions with people located in remote corners of the United States, England, Australia, and other countries. They had few options for getting the help they needed. …
The legality of Skype therapy is a gray area because most state laws require the professional to hold a license in the state where the client resides. Because I was trained as a psychoanalyst, and psychoanalysis is not a regulated profession in most states, I skirt such licensing laws by offering my services in that capacity. Some therapists call themselves “life coaches” when they work across state lines; others simply ignore the law. The arrival of distance therapy and telemedicine is rapidly rendering state-by-state licensure impractical. As usual, the law lags far behind technical innovation.
Are being bodies together and technologically-mediated simulations of being bodies together functionally equivalent, at least for the purposes of the psychoanalytic psychotherapy practiced by both Burgo and me?
According to a soon to be published book by Gillian Isaacs Russell titled Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy the answer is a resounding no (disclosure: I wrote the Foreword for this fine volume). In fact, after this book hits the shelves patients and therapists alike will need to be attentive both to the obvious gains from screen relations based treatment and the inevitable losses. Russell effectively demolishes the myth of functional equivalence using her ethnographic study of therapists and patients who have experienced Skype therapy along with lab findings from cognitive and neuro-science, communication studies, infant observation, and human–computer interaction, as well as a deep dive into clinical theory,
According to Russell, in an exchange we had about the Burgo article, when you eliminate the experience of being bodies together you constrain and limit what is therapeutically possible to “‘states of mind’ rather than ‘states of being.’” As a result, reflective introspection gets narrowed. How reflective can one really be when talking to a dashboard iPhone on a long drive?
Previous Dish on telemedicine here. In other therapy news, Tina Rosenberg flags research on providing mental health care to those in developing nations:
Two years ago, I wrote about a research study in 2002 that provided group interpersonal therapy, led by college students and high school graduates with two weeks’ training, to depressed women in Ugandan villages. The treatment was so effective that six months after starting this therapy, only 6 percent of those treated still had major depression.
More recently, similar work has gone on in South Asia. In rural Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the Thinking Healthy Program taught basic cognitive behavioral therapy for only two days to female community health workers with a high school education. The trainees, called Lady Health Workers, then integrated the therapy into their regular visits with pregnant women and new mothers. … Six months later, only 3 percent of those treated were still depressed. The largest study was in Goa, India, where local people with no health background were given an eight-week course in interpersonal psychotherapy and worked with physicians to treat patients with mental health disorders. This, too, was very successful.
These studies were proof that depression could be treated in poor countries by lay people. Now these researchers are trying to figure out how to streamline these interventions to the minimum outlay of resources needed to maintain excellent results.
Lastly, some somewhat lighter fare – Amanda Bloom covers a popular podcast from comedian Paul Gilmartin:
Gilmartin, 51, is the creator and host of The Mental-Illness Happy Hour, a weekly two-hour trudge to the darkest—and most joyful—corners of the human condition. He records the podcast in his hometown of Los Angeles, and the show is built around interviews with celebrities, artists, therapists, and podcast listeners; anonymous surveys; and Gilmartin’s narration of his own struggles with depression, addiction, and overcoming sexual abuse. Thirty-five thousand people download the podcast each week, and some episodes—interviews he’s held with Marc Maron, Maria Bamford, and Adam Carolla, for example—have been downloaded more than 80,000 times. The Mental-Illness Happy Hour website is home to an active listener forum, and the show’s 200th episode aired on November 21.
The podcast serves as a place of community and affirmation for those who struggle with mental illness, including Gilmartin, who has been undergoing treatment for clinical depression since 1999 and has gained clarity on his own issues through talking with his guests and corresponding with his listeners. It was while interviewing comedian Danielle Koenig during episode 16 of the podcast that Gilmartin realized on-air that he had been molested by a neighbor as a young boy, and the revelation that he was a survivor of incest began its slow simmer while talking with radio personality Phil Hendrie on episode 59. …
Levity and humor also keep the podcast from being overwhelmingly heavy, and listeners can expect a dick joke every now and again, in between tales of binge eating, drug dealing and coping mechanisms.
I am both flattered and apprehensive to be playing the role of one half of Andrew Sullivan for you this week. (The other half belongs to Will Wilkinson.) I’m going to be presumptuous and say I suspect I’m here to represent the left-hand portion of Andrew’s psyche. I started out, years ago, writing mostly for The Awl. More recently I’ve been writing for Gawker and The Guardian. Though I’ve had my fair share of mud thrown at me online, few have ever accused me of anything like libertarianism. Or even centrism. Blame it on my being born and raised in the heathen socialist wilds of Canada, if you like.
radically. Though Cat Fancy tried to adapt, it never totally broke free from its origins in a different era of cat enthusiasm. To understand the seismic shift in cat culture, you can start by picking apart Cat Fancy‘s name. It used to be much more than a whimsical reference to the enjoyment of felines. When the magazine launched in 1965, animal lovers were very familiar with something called “the cat fancy.” The term referred to a connoisseurlike approach to cats: following professional cat shows, maintaining directories of cat breeders, and recognizing the importance of purebred bloodlines. “Back then, the people who had all the knowledge tended to be the people who were showing cats, breeding cats, everything like that,” said Melissa Kauffman, senior editorial director for I-5. …
The Dish 